Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to compete in the international marketplace as markets become more global. The increasing competition in many areas of manufacturing, commerce, services, and other forms of business leads to sinking market prices, which in turn causes profit margins to decrease. Meanwhile, rapidly changing technologies lead to greater automation, which increases efficiency and allows corporations to produce more with fewer employees.
However, with the increased pressure on reducing costs, organizations find that they must also optimize use of their human resources. There is a growing trend in costs associated with employees on a per-capita basis, due to increases in salaries and benefits. While sophisticated methods of tracking costs associated with raw material, machinery, rent, shipping, and the like have existed for decades and are still constantly improving, there is a need to track and allocate time spent by employees and contract workers in a sophisticated manner that allows management to improve upon the traditional methods of human resource allocation, verification, approval, and planning.
Information on when an employee has performed work and for what reason is important for different areas of the organization, such as personnel administration, logistics, and accounting. A uniform record of hours worked would allow a great simplification of the work flow in the organization.
Presently, time sheet entries and processing are often done on a micro-level. Time entries inputted by employees in a department are added together by project or by division, and management receives a weekly or monthly report that does little more than provide the totals for that particular department. When a project involves several departments working on diverse aspects of the project, it is often difficult to ascertain the total time spent by the various individuals and the costs associated with that time. Very often a given individual may spend a certain number of hours accomplishing a particular task that provides benefits to several projects, in which case it is difficult to correctly and accurately determine each project""s share of the benefit. For example, a salesperson working for a large corporation may take several trips to visit a customer""s facilities to better ascertain the needs of the customer and to build a good working relationship. The time spent on such trips, as well as time spent building and maintaining relationships may be difficult to track in the first place, let alone accurately assign to various projects in which the customer is involved. Similarly, a researcher may discover a method of improving efficiency in a manufacturing process that may be applied to several ongoing projects. As another example, an individual working in the Information Services department of the organization may spend various amounts of time on different projects such as system maintenance, upgrading computers for individuals across several departments, making purchasing decisions, and attending trade shows.
Furthermore, it would be efficient from the organization""s point of view to have various departments in the organizations view the time entries of the above individuals. For example, a project manager may wish to determine whether there are enough people working on the project and whether those people are allocating sufficient time for it. Human resources may want to ascertain that employees are correctly allocated to various projects, and to determine whether more employees with particular qualifications need to be hired. Accounting would need to add up the costs associated with different projects to ensure that there are no overruns.
Presently, there is a need for a system to track time sheet information and compile data for such various applications, without utilizing a complex network of links to coordinate and distribute data. It would be advantageous to have an effective method of tracking time entries and compiling time sheet information to provide information on internal employees"" and external service providers"" working times for a variety of applications.
The present invention relates to a method for compiling time entry data in a common or joint data pool and providing the data to multiple applications. By combining data and storing it in one central system, the data may be asynchronously distributed, either automatically or on a needed basis. A transparent system allows additional processing, such as verification and approval, on separate portions of the data pool before the data is distributed. Corrections or updates to the data are automatically forwarded to the relevant applications.
An object of the invention is to provide a novel method of compiling time entry data from a variety of sources in a data pool and providing the data to several applications.
Another object of the invention is to monitor time entry data and the information derived from them.
Another object of the invention is to improve transparency in the sharing of time entry data across applications.
Another object of the invention is to automatically and asynchronously distribute compilations of time entry data.
Another object of the invention is to apply asynchronous processing on time entry data to be distributed to several applications.
Another object of the invention is to automatically forward corrected or updated time entry data to several applications.